There was a time when you needed a computer with Windows if you wanted to play any popular game, use popular services and programs, or have support for the widest range of hardware. This has been changing over time for a number of reasons. Chromebooks have surged in popularity, but they still fail when it comes to those rare moments when a Windows device is needed (such as AAA gaming). This is why people got excited at the possibility of being able to dual-boot Windows on their less expensive Chromebook, but some new information has led many to believe the Pixelbook might be the only current Chromebook to gain support for Windows 10.
We first reported on this AltOS mode for the Google Pixelbook back in April of this year and it piqued the interest of a lot of enthusiasts. The commits to this discovery can be found here and here, but at that time there was little to no additional information to go on. Some thought it would have been a way to run Windows on a Chromebook, while others speculated that it could be related to a mysterious operating system that Google is currently working on. A month later, mentions of WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) and HLK (Windows Hardware Lab Kit) visible in Chromium commits confirmed to us that this suspected AltOS mode was related to Microsoft Windows and that it wouldn’t be some fly-by-night hack job.
These commits were only focused on the Pixelbook from Google, but many felt that if it would work on the Pixelbook then the feature would make its way to other supported Chromebooks as well. It was only a few days ago that we reported on the possibility that Chromebooks may get a feature similar to Apple’s Boot Camp, which would allow them to dual-boot Windows 10. We learned that this new feature, dubbed Campfire, would be available on more than just the Pixelbook, but details were still few and far between as there hadn’t been any official announcements made by any company.
Now, it seems some more information is making its way to the public thanks to comments made to a commit in Google’s Chromium Gerrit. So while the previous report about Windows 10 dual booting support coming to a variety of Chromebooks may still be still true, the Google Pixelbook may be the only Chromebook on the market today that receives support for the new Campfire feature. Here is the comment (“Eve” is the codename for the Pixelbook):
Considering that this is and should forever remain an Eve-specific thing, I think it would be better to attach the custom updater higher (e.g. other boards should never even have a reason to “preserve” anything here so this call is useless). We will still need to change more about the Eve legacy update flow anyway to deal with the fact that it was shipped before we started putting cros_allow_auto_update files into CBFS, so I think we’ll end up needing to overwrite all of check_and_update_legacy() anyway. Why not do that right now? I think keeping stuff cleaner for all future boards weighs higher than the little bit of code duplication this would net us for this one board.
Via: 9to5 Google Source: Chromium Gerrit
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